ABSPD – Photographing and Drawing Shapes

The first week of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design has been brilliant; lots of exercises to get us back to basics and ready to create. My background in art is academic – I have a degree in Art History – but I’ve always sketched and scribbled. This course is great for bringing all my scrappy interests together under one discipline.

Exercise one was to choose a shape and go out find it in nature and my surroundings. Turns out I’m naturally drawn towards circles (who knew?!) so above is a collage of my favourite shots.

Next it was back to still life sketching, finding shapes within a natural form and focusing on different elements. I admit I didn’t give as much time to this as I could and could probably have done more sketching, but I’m still working on how to timetable this around the rest of my life! I chose a yellow freesia, then did the below sketches using black felt pens and coloured pencils.

I’ll post the next set of completed exercises tomorrow – we are already into week 2 and I’m determined not to slip behind!